Word: cared
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Health-care costs have nearly doubled since 1980, to become the leading cause of personal and small-business bankruptcy. Collectively we spend $600 billion a year on medical care, or 11% of GNP -- a higher percentage than any other nation devotes to health. But the U.S. health system may be one of the few instances of social pathology that truly deserve to be compared to cancer. < It grows uncontrollably -- in terms of dollars -- but seems to become more dysfunctional with every metastatic leap...
...insured, the leading side effect of illness is often financial doom. Consider the elderly, whose federally sponsored insurance program, Medicare, inspires so much drooling and sharpening of knives at budget time. Even with Medicare, older Americans are forced to spend more than 15% of their income for medical care annually. And since nursing-home care is virtually uncovered, the elderly are pushed to degrading extremes -- like divorcing a beloved spouse -- in order to qualify for help through a long-term debilitating illness. Or, as more than one public figure has suggested, they can shuffle off prematurely to their reward...
...everyone knows that the system is broken beyond repair. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 3 out of 4 Americans favor a government- financed national health-care program. The AFL-CIO is campaigning vigorously for national health care, and Big Business, terrified by the skyrocketing cost of employee health benefits, seems ready to go along. Even in the medical profession -- the ancient redoubt of free-enterprise traditionalists -- a majority now favor national health insurance...
...rejects: first the elderly, then the extremely poor. Since the rejects are of course the most expensive to insure, government is soon faced with a budget nightmare. Draconian cost-control measures follow. But because government can only attempt to control the costs of its own programs, the providers of care simply shift their costs onto the bills of privately insured patients. Faced with ever rising costs, the private insurers become more determined to shed the poorest and the sickest . . . and so the cycle goes...
With the largest-ever consensus behind it, national health care's time is surely here at last. Otherwise, let us bow our heads together and recite the old Episcopal prayer: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done . . . and there is no health...